Welcome to e-Literate 2.0

At long last, I have managed to move my blog over to WordPress. Many thanks to Sarah Lewis at Blogging Expertise for helping me get my content out of ExpressionEngine, style the site the way I wanted, and make sure that old URLs didn’t break. She was able to head some problems off at the pass that probably would have taken somebody with less WordPress-specific experience days to figure out.

There are a number of little issues I’m still working out (mostly small post formatting problems that I’m correcting by hand), but everything should work here. Please let me know if you spot any problems. All major URLs, including the RSS feed, should auto-forward, but just in case, you might want to update your RSS reader to the new feed URL, which is http://feeds.feedburner.com/mfeldstein/yyMY.

In the meantime, I thought I would take the opportunity to point out a few features of the new blog that you might find useful:

One of the biggest problems with blogs is that, while they are very good at bringing you new content in a timely manner, they are not so good at helping you find old content that you may find valuable but missed when it was first published. The typical calendar archive interface is useless unless you happen to know you are looking for a particular post published on a particular date. (Notice that my new sidebar doesn’t even have a calendar.) Search is OK, but not spectacular. (And it was worse on ExpressionEngine, which only indexed post titles.) Accordingly, this blog has a number features that are designed to help you find more of the content that interests you:

• You’ll notice a list of related posts at the bottom of this one. My blog is basically using Yahoo! text analysis capabilities to find posts that look similar to this one and suggest them to you. This is done automagically, so I don’t have to remember and link to every closely related post that I have made.
• You’ll also notice a list of tags underneath the title of the post. Tagging was long overdue functionality and I am delighted to finally have it. If you go to the Archives page and scroll to the bottom, you’ll see a tag cloud that gives you a sense of what all I’ve been blogging about with links to content associated with each tag.
• The second post down on the home page is in its own box and has a title that starts out “From the Archives:”. That feature randomly pulls an old post from the collection of those that I thought were notable. (This feature only shows up on the web page; you won’t get archived content pushed to the RSS feed.)

In addition to being better about helping you find older content, I like the new site’s ability to help you find and keep track of conversations on the blog.

• The sidebar has an “Active Discussions” heading that shows active comment threads.
• Each post now has its own RSS feed (which you can find at the bottom of the post near the spot where you would post comments).

And finally, one feature that you personally probably won’t find very useful (particularly if you’re reading this post now in English), but I point out just because it’s cool:

Click on one of the flags in the sidebar under the “Translate This Site” heading. it will show the site machine translated into the language of the country whose flag you clicked on.

I just love that.